A boutique care service that delivers personal support and assistance to people in their own homes, SweetTree provides specialised home care services for individuals with a wide range of unique needs. Providing 24 / 7 support to clients and their families, a reliable telephony and communications infrastructure is vital for ensuring first-contact resolution and peace of mind for service users.
With up to 450 care assistants in the field and 70 office-based staff, communication technologies are also central to the day-to-day activities of SweetTree personnel.
Especially when it comes to enabling those all-important interactions with clients, social workers, district nurses, care managers and GPs that make the delivery of joined-up and informed care possible.
However, an ageing telephone system was inhibiting SweetTree's ability to make its workforce more productive and efficient. Worse still, having reached maximum capacity, the platform was no longer suitable for a rapidly expanding organisation. With new NHS contracts waiting in the wings, SweetTree wanted a solution that would deliver the resilience, agility and scalability it needs to cope with future demands.
"We took the decision to review the entire communications infrastructure - we had an extensive shopping list of requirements," explains Phil Bones, IT Manager at SweetTree Home Care Services.
"The ability to configure call groups was essential as was the ability to monitor and record calls for reporting and compliance requirements. We also needed to be certain we could seamlessly deal with out-of-hours calls in the event of a disaster or system failure scenario," he explains.